On the business of life

[drwex]

I'm mostly dumping this here so I can reference it later, but commentary is welcome. This came out of a discussion of the relationship of WiiTID to the profitability of the enterprises that employ people like me:

Profit is like health, to a corporation. You have to have it, and more is good. But it's not the reason for existence.

Comments

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

it at least acknowledges labor as part of the cost of producing something, or at least leaves very little room for ripping off a worker to make the inefficiencies even more obvious by enlarging the profit noise.

I'm less than convinced. Let's say that there are several parts of construction which require skilled labor (which shouldn't be a stretch). Let's further suppose that the supply of skilled labor is shorter than the supply of unskilled labor.

From an engineering perspective, changes which allow more of the construction to be performed by cheaper unskilled labor will increase profits; how is this "a sign of waste"?